Hello from Azimuth to all of you and welcome to another instalment of the blog. Last time we left you, we had just arrived in Fiji after a slight navigational error left us short of getting to Minerva Reef. This time, we will tell you in on what we have been up to in Fiji.
We spent sometime recovering from the long trip from New Zealand and taking it easy. After going through the check-in process with the various departments of customs, immigration, health and biosecurity, we still had more paperwork to deal with. Officially we were not allowed to leave Savusavu with the boat until we received our cruising permit and this we were told could take a couple of working days. We took a trip to shore the next day to get the lay of the land, discover a bit of the town, pay a visit to the ATM for some Fijian Dollars and pay the numerous invoices for the health and biosecurity offices. That dealt with we adjourned for lunch at the Captains Table in the Copra Shed marina whom were renting us our mooring. A very nice place as it turns out, complete with the ‘Yacht Club’, a delightful little bar next to the waterfront!
We pottered about for a few days, discovering that the cost of food in Fiji was very reasonable and the choice very good too, with many of products from New Zealand, and cheaper than New Zealand too! Now we wished we had just waited until we arrived here to stock up on the major items for the boat. Still it bodes well for when we need to stock up again to head to the more remote parts of the Pacific.
We had some jobs to do as well. We sent Ailsa up the mast to rethread the main halyard which I had cut back and re spliced a loop in the end. Ailsa hauled up a mousing line to the top of the mast with fishing weights attached and threaded in through the main halyard sheave and fed it in the mast, then she dropped down and managed to fish it out of the small hole where the halyard exits the mast again. I was chief winch grinder for the whole operation, hoisting her up and down. We then pulled the mousing line through, attached the halyard and pulled it back through the mast. Tick, one job done!
The other major job was the repair of the autopilot, and that had me foxed for a bit. I didn’t want to start dismantling things until I had a better idea of what was wrong, so I fired an email off the manufacturer for some advice, after asking AI what was wrong. (AI was singularly unhelpful in this case!) In the end, an answer came back a week later. They diagnosed the problem as being the motor brushes. In my wisdom, when I bought the autopilot in Colombia, I also bought several spare parts too, one of which was a set of motor brushes. I spent half a day dismantling the motor, and low and behold, the brushes did look very worn, right down to the end of the springs. I cleaned out the dust, installed the new brushes and bloody hell the thing works again! I was a very happy chappy.
We only had 9 months left on our passports, and since we want to head far in to the very remote parts of the Pacific, we needed to get some replacement passports while we had time here in Fiji. Now to get a new UK passport, we have to return the old passports. Now this felt very WRONG! Effectively here we are in the back end of Fiji and we have to willingly surrender our passports? We were both very nervous about the idea. Still we completed the online applications and was given an address to send them too. We headed down to the local DHL office, a tin shed on the water front with our precious passports wrapped up in an envelope and asked if we could send them back to the UK. A lovely guy told us no problem! He then started the process, filing out the details on his computer. He took ages, with me repeating the details several times, eventually coming round the counter and helping him fill in the form and very carefully checking the details! We got there though, paid our 100 or so dollars and left him in care of our precious passports. It felt wrong!
He gave me print out with the DHL tracking number, and every day after that i was checking the website to see if our passports were on there way. For some reason the tracking status did not change for the next 5 days! All it said was, that the package was waiting to be collected? I was about to head to the office to find out what was going on, when the status finally changed, our passports had departed Fiji and were on the way to Sydney! Phew! We both breathed a sigh of relief. It took another week or so to get to the passport office and we had confirmation they were received. Our new passports have been issued and are sitting at Judith’s house (Ailsa’s Mum). All we need is for them to deliver the old passports back (which we still need) and then we can arrange for DHL to collect and hold our breath whilst they deliver them back to the tin shed in Savusavu … watch this space!
To take our minds off the passports, we decided to take the walk out of town and go and visit the local chocolate factory, a small cocoa plantation in the hills around Savusavu. We had a fascinating afternoon having the tour of the plantation and the small operation where they process the cocoa beans and then the all important sampling session and of course the parting off money to purchase several bars! We met the owner too, a very interesting chap called Richard who was originally from the UK and had led a very well travelled life all round the globe and ended up in Fiji. The plantation was his retirement project.
We made some new friends in Savusavu too, and as it happens ran in to some old friends as well. We originally met Ken and Caroline on their catamaran Water Music all the way back in Tobago Cays in St Vincent and the Grenadines and we had spent a week cruising together back in Grenada before we parted ways, so it was a lovely surprise when they popped up on our No Foreign Land cruising app as having also arrived in Savusavu. They came over to Azimuth for a cuppa and we arranged to meet that evening for a few drinks and a catch up at the Yacht Club. Ailsa knew she had met her match at the bar when she ordered the first round consisting of a couple of beers for Ken and I and two glasses of wine for her and Caroline. Caroline immediately interjected and said her fine British accent, “darling don’t you think we should buy a bottle of wine?!” Well, it was a fantastically fun evening, trading stories from our travels since we left each other in the Caribbean. I think the wine bottle tally hit 3 for the evening and we had to pour Caroline and Ailsa in to the dinghies to return back to the boats!
The invited us to their boat in the marina the next night and we talked well in to the night again. Ailsa and I were both exhausted and we cant keep up with these two Septuagenarians, they are hardcore!
In the meantime, we had managed to get our cruising permit from the customs office, they were like all the other officials, very amiable and easy to deal with as long as you are happy to wait.
We had a few more meals out in town and stocked up on a few veggies. We wanted to head out and go cruising for a few weeks and plan to head back to Savusavu to collect our passports when we get that sorted. Ailsa spent a good deal of time watching World Cup Matches too!
As it turned out, Ken and Caroline didn’t have long left in Fiji and were due to park up the boat and head back to the UK in a few days, so we headed out for one last night together anchored only 4 miles from Savusavu off the beach from the Cousteau resort. Ken and Caroline eventually headed off in the other direction to us the next morning after we helped them extract their chain from a coral bommie! Hopefully we will see them again someday, we do hope so, they are such fun. They plan to head to Australia eventually where they will hang up the sailing shoes and sell Water Music.
Soon after they left we got boarded by the Fijian Navy! They were in the area and wanted to check all the paperwork on the boat. Two blokes and a young woman came on board to come and check the boat whilst a large rib moored up to Azimuth full of mean looking Navy men! As it turned out, again, they were very amiable. I handed the officer all the paperwork we had, and thankfully it was all in order. Then he asked to see our passports! Uh oh! In all the time we have been travelling across this planet by boat, the only time we have ever had to show our passports has been when we either check-in or check-out of a country. Now here we are without our passports and this Navy guy wants to see them! Well, I explained that we no longer had them and we were applying for new ones. He didn’t seem to mind especially as I had copies of them on my computer. We got away with it!
After a couple of days wait, the wind swung round a little and allowed us to head off from this anchorage further east along the coast of Viani Levu, the North Fijian Island where Savusavu resides. We had a lovely sail along the coast arriving in Vianu Bay in the late afternoon. Vianu Bay is huge and very deep with coral all round the edge. We didn’t want to snag a coral bommie so we dropped in 25 metres of water in a dark blue patch on the satellite image. Turned out we were quite near coral though! As we pulled back on 75m of chain, I checked the depth at the back of Azimuth and it was only 5m! We didn’t like that, so ended up moving again further out in the bay. These deep anchorages seem to be the theme around here. The shore shelves steeply and is mostly coral.
We had a couple of days in Vianu, but it was windy and a swell rolled in to the bay. The forecast weas for really strong winds, so we decided to move round the corner to another bay called Dakuniba Bay to ride out the blow. We pulled up the anchor, but the windlass did not sound right? About 15metres from the anchor it seized up!!! Oh no, not again! I found myself, yet again winding in the anchor by hand!
So I was not happy (that’s an understatement!) as we motored through a very narrow passage in the reef, with Ailsa at the front of the boat shouting if she saw shallow spots.
Eventually we got to a beautiful bay surrounded by mangroves with some small dwellings on the shore behind a small beach.
Not long after we arrived a older Fijian guy pottered up in his longboat with a huge sack of grapefruit he had had his nephew pick off the tree in his garden. His name was David, and this was to be the start of a lovely friendship over the next week. David and his family own 800 acres of land in this bay and run a simple farm. He was incredibly generous to us, bringing us the grapefruits, a huge bunch of banana’s, eggs, papaya, lemons, soursop, and other things! We gave him some Kava root that we had onboard to give to local people, that is prized. They use it to produce a drink that I had once in Tonga when we visited there. It has a peppery taste that numbs your mouth and if you drink enough is a bit like the effects of alcohol. I also gave David all the petrol we had onboard, about 10 litres for his outboard.
The first 4 days of being in this anchorage were taken up (for me anyway) stripping down the windlass to try and work out why it had seized up? I assumed that the gearbox had leaked oil. It was hard going. My boxing in job of the windlass had been thorough, but I had neglected to use stainless screws for some of the fittings and so they had rusted away in only 18 months. That took a day and I managed to get the hydraulic motor off without too much difficulty. The next 2 days were taken up with me swearing at the gearbox which refused to budge! Ailsa joined me on the 4th day to help but after a few hours it seemed hopeless. I couldn’t get the gearbox off, and therefore I couldn’t check if it had any oil in it. I admit I became somewhat despondent after that. Both Ailsa and David tried to cheer me up and a couple of beers helped a little. That night just as I got in to bed, the solution came to me. Because of where the gearbox is situated, I couldn’t get access to the oil fill hole ( and its at the bottom of the gearbox anyway, so pretty useless!) I decided to drill my own oil fill hole in the side of the gearbox case!
The next day I did just that, careful not to let any metal shavings fall inside the gearbox, i drilled a small hole and tapped it at M8, then used a short M8 bolt with Teflon tape to seal it as the fill cap. I pumped gearbox oil in to the box (it didn’t take a huge amount to fill it) and then put the whole thing back together. When I fired up the windlass, the gearbox ran nice and smooth again…. fingers crossed this is a permanent fix? (or have i just jinxed it again?!) So far so good.
One day I took a trip in to the mangroves along a couple of small rivers (see video below) and I met up with David. He took me to go and feed the pigs on his farm. They had all escaped from their makeshift pen in the coconut palms when we arrived, but David had them running, and they all clambered to get back in their pen. I realised why as I watched him chop up coconuts that we had been collecting on the way with an axe and throw them in to the pigs. They all went crazy and started fighting each other to get the coconut flesh! I also met David’s brother and other family members up at the farm. Such a beautiful place.
On another trip, Ailsa and I took the dinghy out and went to snorkel off a beach outside of the bay in the channel inside the reef. It was great fun. You shall see an amusing scene on the video below if you watch it!
After a week then, the wind dropped, and we said our goodbyes to David, promising to come back and see him again. And now we headed off with plans to circumnavigate Vianu Levu back to Savusavu.
It was pretty windy when we left the protection of the South coast of the island and got hit by the trade winds. We sailed up through a narrow passage between the main island and the island of Kioa, and arrived at another beautiful anchorage in a bay with mangroves. We spent a couple of days relaxing, no more boat jobs pending! I took the canoe out to explore and did plenty of snorkelling too. The reef here was very healthy and the bay was full of bright blue starfish.
Another short sail took us further North to Rabi Island and the pretty anchorage of St Katherine. To get there, we had to cross the international dateline again, the charts and satellite images are terrible! Very lots of mark one eyeball and reliance on depth sounders!
Rabi is occupied by the Banaban Indians. They have an interesting story to tell, one where we didn’t feel proud to be British:
The Banaban people are the indigenous inhabitants of Banaba Island (in Kiribati), with a rich cultural heritage disrupted by colonial phosphate mining and forced relocation to Rabi Island, Fiji.
In 1900, the British annexed Banaba and leased the island to the Pacific Islands Company for phosphate mining under a 999-year agreement, providing minimal compensation to the Banabans. The British Phosphate Commission (BPC) oversaw extensive mining operations, which removed nearly all of the island’s surface, leaving it environmentally devastated and largely uninhabitable. The Banabans received less than 0.1% of the profits generated from phosphate used in global agriculture, highlighting the economic exploitation they endured.
During World War II, the Japanese invasion prompted the relocation of Banabans to other islands, and eventually to Rabi Island in Fiji in 1945. Upon arrival, they faced unfamiliar conditions, including a lack of housing and infrastructure, and had to rebuild their community from scratch. Despite these hardships, the Banabans maintained their cultural practices, language, and social structures, ensuring the continuity of their identity
We read about this before we took a trip to shore. We were met by some incredibly friendly people, and took a stroll round the town followed everywhere by a herd of children, picked up some supplies at a little shop and headed back to buy some fish from the local fisherman’s commune on the shore.
We had already met the guy who ran this when we arrived in the dinghy. When we returned, he asked me if I could come and have a look, they had a problem with their solar panels and the freezer where they kept the catch of the day had stopped working? Of course I went to have a look, the inverter and batteries for the system was stuck in a little dark room in the corner of the shed, so I took a look. We bought some fish, and I took some photos of the equipment and promised I would come back in an hour or so when I got back to the boat and downloaded the manuals for the inverter to see if i could diagnose what was wrong .
So that’s what I did, I got some tools together and we went back to the shed. Well I stripped the unit down and cleaned some terminals and tinkered around for a couple of hours, but couldn’t find the problem. It was complaining that the DC input voltage was too high, but when I measured the voltage with my multi-meter it was fine, and didn’t match the voltage the display was saying. However, when I put it all back together again and switched it on, it worked! That left the fisherman very happy, because the freezer came back on, and the fish were saved.
I promised I would email the company and find out what the problem had been and how to fix it which I did when we got back to the boat. They replied the next day and we went back to the fishing commune to tell them what the company had said. Basically they gave a list of issues it could be, but thankfully the system was still working okay the next day. The fisherman were still very happy. I gave them a contact for the inverter distributor in Fiji in case they had a problem again. They gave us a big bunch of banana’s to say thankyou and joked that I had magic fingers to have fixed the problem. I still don’t know how I fixed it?! But I was happy to have helped them out. They are miles from anywhere, very remote even for Fiji. Hopefully it continues to work! I think we have made some solid friends on Rabi Island!
After a couple of days, we started the journey North again. A really surprising sail along the windward side of Rabi Island had us hard over on a beam reach doing 9 knots but on a perfectly flat sea and then we worked our way through another reef channel using the satellite map and dropped the hook off a beach with a busy village at the back called Albert Cove. We didn’t stay that long, we were getting woken up every morning at 5am by kids on the beach practising recorders?!
Since then we stayed the night in a windy anchorage off a small island called Trilagica Island off the North Side of Vianu Levu.
The sailing has been magical as the North side is the windward side and we have had 25 knots of wind on a broad reach but with flat seas. Azimuth has been whisking along at about 8 to 9 knots.
So here we are now as I write this sitting off another beach on the North side of Vianu Levu in a beautiful bay called Blackjack Bay, we have had a couple visitors from local people who live around the area as we seem to be on a transit route to a local small shop about 3 miles up the river from us. Everyone is super friendly!
I will leave you now. When I started writing this, I thought I didn;t have very much to say, but it turns out we have actually been quite busy!
Here’s a video that gives you a flavour of some of the places we have visited. Join us next time as we explore more of this fabulous country.
Dom and Ailsa on Azimuth.